Tag Archives: practice

In the way

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In her recent Substack essay, ‘Is Spirituality an Escape?‘, Joan Tollifson writes:

I don’t want to ignore the world or turn away. But I don’t want to be pulled down into the madness of it either. Karl Marx famously wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” I don’t want to offer people false or illusory comfort or an intoxicating or addictive escape from a grim reality. But I have a deep sense of a peace and freedom that is untouched by the world and a way of being “in the world but not of the world” that I feel is perhaps the deepest healing we can offer to the world because it goes to the root of the problems.

So, all of this was swirling around. Round and round goes the mind. The body contracts and tightens. Feelings of anger and judgment arise, and I seem to lose touch with love and joy.

But then, miracle of miracles, I stop and sit quietly and simply feel the open, spacious aliveness and presence of this one bottomless moment here and now. And the whole conundrum disappears. And I know in my heart without a doubt that this openness, this stillness, is the deepest truth. It is where I want to come from, and what I want to communicate, this possibility of peace and unconditional love that is always right here, at once boundless and most intimate.

These are, to say the least, difficult and puzzling times. The merest glance at the headlines will suffice to demonstrate that, and to demonstrate the further fact that the media, almost without exception, have a perfectly understandable commercial interest in keeping our hearts in our mouths. In the face of massively publicised and widespread cruelty and injustice, violence and deceit, it is increasingly hard to avoid the current zeitgeist of taking sides, adopting entrenched positions, and demonising the “opposition”.

This jarring sense of disconnection between the contemplative life and the activist’s “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention!” is something that has troubled me for many years, as it has been troubling Tollifson and so many of her fellow Americans. But it is nothing new, I fear.

Simon Barrington-Ward wrote of St. Silouan:

…he began to recognise that [his sense of darkness and isolation] was in part the oppression of the absence of the sense of God and the alienation from his love over the whole face of the globe. He had been called to undergo this travail himself not on account of his own sin any more, but that he might enter into the darkness of separated humanity and tormented nature and, through his ceaseless prayer, be made by God’s grace alone into a means of bringing that grace to bear on the tragic circumstances of his time. He was praying and living through the time of World War I and the rise of Hitler and the beginnings of all that led to the Holocaust [not to mention the Russian Revolution, and at the very end of his life, Stalin’s Great Purge]. And with all this awareness of pain and sorrow, he was also given a great serenity and peacefulness and goodness about his, which profoundly impressed those who know him.

For all of us in our lesser ways, the Jesus Prayer, as well as bringing us into something of this kind of alternation which St. Silouan so strikingly experienced, also leads us on with him into an ever-deepening peace. You can understand how those who first taught and practiced this kind of prayer were first called “hesychasts”: people of hesychia or stillness…

After all, the whole prayer becomes an intercession. Soon I find that I am no longer praying just for myself, but when I say “on me, a sinner” all the situations of grief and terror, of pain and suffering begin to be drawn into me and I into them. I begin to pray as a fragment of this wounded creation longing for its release into fulfillment… I am in those for whom I would pray and they are in me, as is the whole universe. Every petition of the prayer becomes a bringing of all into the presence and love of God…

(The Jesus Prayer, of which Bishop Simon is writing here, is of course the central practice of hesychasm, the great mystical tradition within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, centred on cultivating inner stillness (Greek: hesychia) and uninterrupted communion with God. It was the central practice, too, of my own Christian contemplative years.)

Again in the Christian tradition, Karen Karper Fredette and Paul Fredette write, in Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life (p.213):

Anyone taking the eremitic vocation seriously is bound to feel helpless, quite impotent, in fact. Hermits are determined to help, to make a positive difference, but how? What can one person do, hidden and alone? Sometimes, solitaries may feel blameworthy because they live lives which shelter them from much of the suffering that so harshly mars the existence of their brothers and sisters. Love and compassion well up in them … but is it enough? What should one do and how? This is where passionate intercessory prayer and supplication spontaneously arises.

The challenge is to live a life given over to praying for others while accepting that one will seldom, if ever, see any results. No one will be able to ascertain how, or even if, their devoted prayers are efficacious for others. It is a terrible kind of poverty—to live dedicated to helping others, yet never know what good one may be doing. All that hermits can hope is that they are doing no harm. Believers leave all results to the mercy of their God. Others rely on their convictions about the interconnection of all humanity, trusting that what affects one, touches all. This is a form of intercession expressed less by words than by a way of life.

The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm and the Nembutsu is their extreme simplicity, coupled with their explicit renunciation of any sense that it is the practitioner’s hard work that is at stake in the process of awakening. We cannot, either by the force of our own will, or by the eloquence of our pleading, bring about the healing for which we long. And yet, like the Fredettes, and like the hesychasts of Mount Athos during the Second World War, we know beyond words or reasoning that our calling matters – far more, perhaps. than anything else we could do.

In the Tao Te Ching (51) we read:

The way gives them life; Virtue rears them; Things give them shape; Circumstances bring them to maturity. Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way and honour virtue. Yet the way is revered and virtue honoured not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so.

(It’s important, too, to recognise that, despite all our acceptance of the way, of “other power”, this is not a way of passivity – an accusation often levelled at Christian Quietists from the C12 Beguines right through to William Pollard and Francis Frith among C19 Quakers! To walk in the way may at times be active indeed; the point being to walk in accordance with the way, not to cease walking altogether!)

Sky gazing

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Occasionally, throughout my life, I have found myself gazing into the open sky, vast, unbounded; and I lying beneath, like an ant at the bottom of a measureless funnel of bright air.

The first time I can remember was at the age of five, lying on an old rug in the orchard at the back of our house, recovering from a long illness. (I have written more of this in the introduction to this blog.) The blue vault of the sky stretched over me, seemingly limitless, threaded by the distant sparkling motes, high overhead, of aircraft heading out over the English Channel towards Europe.

There were other, less striking occasions during my teens and twenties; it did not come again, recognisably, until some time in my thirties, lying – once again in an orchard! – with friends late at night at an isolated farmhouse near Poitiers in central France, far from any human lights, gazing up at the Milky Way stretching far into the interstellar distances, sparkling with uncountable stars. The sense of self and place, the voices of my companions, the night sounds of insects and owls, all fell away. I was alone in a timeless immeasurable distance; only I was not. All there was was light; light beyond light, without place or end or source.

It was many years again before I stumbled across the fact that in Dzogchen there is a long-established practice actually known as “Sky-gazing” (Tögal), which delineates, in typically precise Tibetan fashion, exactly what had been happening to me on these occasions. (See also Matthieu Ricard, p.93ff)

It isn’t necessary to lie out under the open sky – though it is beautiful and profoundly healing when it can be done – but merely to gaze up into the interior of one’s vision (usually, I find, with closed eyes), or even into a patch of sky glimpsed through a window, Thoughts, sensations, dream states (hypnogogia) will inevitably occur, but they can safely be allowed to pass. All that is necessary is to lie still.

A barking dog. Green leaves dancing in the sunlight. The listening silence. Open. Vast. Limitless. Just this!

This is not like anything else. It is as it is. How is it? It’s not any particular way for it is always changing…

The real message is what remains after the ink has vanished. But if you are looking to see what that is, you will never find it, for you are looking for an object. Presence is not an object. It is the openness that beholds it all.

Joan Tollifson, Nothing to Grasp, p.34

Mysterium Tremendum

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It is no surprise that we humans would deny death’s certain coming, fight it, and seek to avoid the demise of the only self we have ever known. As Kathleen Dowling Singh puts it in her groundbreaking book, The Grace in Dying, “It is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being … it is absurd and monstrous.”

“The Ground of Being,” a commanding phrase that Paul Tillich used, is an excellent metaphor for what most of us would call God (Acts 17:28 [“For in him we live and move and have our being”]). For Singh, it is the source and goal that we both deeply desire and desperately fear. It is the Mysterium Tremendum of Rudolf Otto, which is both alluring and frightful at the same time. Both God and death feel like “engulfment,” as when you first gave yourself totally to another person. It is the very union that will liberate us, yet we resist, retrench, and run…

The path of dying and rising is exactly what any in-depth spiritual teaching must aim for. It alone allows us to say afterward, “What did I ever lose by dying?” It is the letting go of all you think you are, moving into a world without any experienced context, and becoming the person you always were anyway—which you always knew at depth, and yet did not know at all on the surface.

Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond, p.111

In a sense, meditation does just this, in small, repeatable doses, if we have the resolve to sit through what seem at the time to be dark places.  We are out of our depth, conclusively – and it can be all too easy to draw back, reflexively, like drawing back one’s hand from an electric shock. If we can sit it out, literally, then we may receive one of the greatest  gifts of our practice.

Just last week, I quoted Eckhart Tolle. I make no apologies for repeating the passage here, since what he says fits so precisely:

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p.65

As Rohr suggests in Immortal Diamond, this may be why initiation rites have traditionally mimicked dying, and why so much of the language of traditional monastic spirituality used the terminology of dying to self, and rising to God. But we are once again at the thin edges of language here, and what actually happens is not in the least metaphorical.

As Rohr suggests, actually to encounter the metaphysical ground is not an experience (if that is even the right word for it) that it is possible to take lightly. It is overwhelming, in every sense of the  word, not least in the way that volition, self-determination, self-anything, are swept away in what simply is. And yet, and yet – where else could one ever hope for?

A very plain stillness

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Joan Tollifson, in one of her Substack essays, writes:

This so-called awakening stuff is so slippery to talk about. Is there anything to do? There is nothing to do, and yet in a way, there is, but it’s more like an undoing, a relaxing, a seeing through, a letting go, or a dissolving, and there’s no one to do it, and what is relaxed into includes seeking, resisting, contracting, and feeling separate. It includes everything! How to make sense of this? The mind simply can’t…

And then, what exactly is “the ocean” in the ocean/wave metaphor? Some say it’s Consciousness or Mind, some say it’s thorough-going impermanence and interdependence, some say it’s radiant presence, some say it’s God or the Ground of Being, some say it’s groundlessness, some say it’s emptiness, some say it’s intelligence-energy, some say it’s spirit, some say it’s no-thing-ness. But this is a good question to keep alive, because it’s very tempting to make something out of no-thing, to put a self or a Self (an author, doer, chooser, decider, creator, controller, manager, observer) where none in fact exists—to reify the ungraspable and slip into dualistic thinking. Thought can even turn “ungraspable no-thing-ness” into Something that it can cling to and worship. Thought is a slippery creator of illusions.

“Thought is a slippery creator of illusions…” and words decorate the illusions with glittering enticements to believe. But as always, the antidote seems to be no more than sitting still in plain awareness, while the thoughts do whatever it is that thoughts do on their own. What seems to happen is that the words peter out when they are not followed, not elaborated upon, but merely allowed to be little upwellings from the silence into which they quietly return.

The ground of being – at least so long as you  leave off the capital letters – carries none of the anthropomorphic frills of doctrine. It simply is; without it, nothing would be.

I wrote here of the “ocean/wave metaphor”. In that post I concluded: “To be still, listening, beside the open ocean, is all it takes; then our fretful wavelets still for a moment, if only between one breath and another, and we can sense the non-differentiation of Istigkeit, the unending of no thing. We are not other than what is.”

The nature of silence

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In Larry Rosenberg’s new book, he writes:

There are many ways to quiet ourselves, all of which are valuable. There’s a silence that comes from reading a book filled with magnificent ideas. There’s a silence in seeing beauty in any form—in nature, taking a swim in the ocean or a walk in the woods, or just being in solitude. But I’m talking about a measureless kind of silence that grows out of the practice. You could say it’s the heart of the practice because the deepest essence of our innermost being is silence.

This silence is shy. You can’t find it through the intellect. You can’t reach it with your emotions. In fact, you can’t search for it—the search itself would cause stirrings, movements, vexation. You can’t order it, expecting to receive silence by command. That would be like commanding love—we all know you can’t force love into existence. Silence likes humility, gentleness, innocence. It likes to be valued for itself. Thought goes into abeyance gently, gracefully, peacefully, without a struggle, without any bloodshed…

This silence is not a rarified experience. Stillness or silence or emptiness is not reserved for mystics who live high up in the Himalayas, wear loincloths, eat one grain of rice a day, sit cross-legged for weeks while freezing cold, or stand on one leg for ten years. It’s part of the human constitution.

The emptiness I’m talking about is not dead; it’s not a vacuity. When the mind gets silent, you’re tapping into the energy of the universe. Though we’re part of the universe, we typically just receive it in little drips—drip, drip, drip, like a faucet that’s not fully turned on. When we let go of who we think we are—all the notions, concepts, images, and delusions—we channel the energy that animates the whole universe. Silence is an energy that’s packed with life. It’s highly charged.

Larry Rosenberg, in an extract from The World Exists to Set Us Free: Straight-Up Dharma for Living a Life of Awareness, published in Tricycle Magazine, July 2025

I’ve often written of silence on this blog, but Larry Rosenberg’s words here seemed to say something I’ve been trying to say for a long time, and probably failing to capture. Silence, the silence of spiritual practice that is so intimately connected with stillness, is not the absence of noise.  It thrives on the presence of background sounds, whether gentle and quiet like the wind in the tall trees behind the garden, or rather less so, like the occasional sirens from the main road – which are actually not all that occasional, since we live near a major hospital. It will grow quite happily, as I wrote the other day, in an airport departure lounge.

No, shy though the silence of the heart seems to be, it is actually a thing of greater power than we’d imagine. In this long extract published in Tricycle Magazine, Rosenberg goes on:

Silence is what spiritual life is about, at least this version of it. Behind all the commotion of our lives there is an unfathomable silence accompanied by unlimited space—an endless dimension. We’re psychonauts, whether we know it or not. Ours is an inner orbit. The Tibetans put it plainly: the cognizing power of emptiness. In silence, there’s an awakening of a kind of intelligence. Great healing, the most important healing, occurs in silence. In silence you find you’re more compassionate, wiser. All the metta, or loving-kindness, you could ever want is in silence.

The longer I go on with the contemplative life, the more obvious it seems to me that what actually happens in the silence is that our apparent separation from the ground, from the source of being itself, falls away. Separation is an illusion anyway, less substantial than moon-shadows on a cloudy night. We are not ever separated from the ground – else how could we exist? – but our enserfment to the useful illusion of our everyday life in consensus reality makes it seem as though we are. Just to sit still in open awareness allows the mind’s illusions to settle out, like sediment in a disturbed pond, until the clear presence can be seen for itself, the ground of all that is.

Vast, empty

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So it’s more about the recognition that the “me” who seems to be “doing” all of this [living and practice] is a mirage. It’s ALL a movement of this undivided whole. The vastness has space for everything, and it clings to nothing. It is open, playful and free. Free to wear robes and free not to wear them. Even free to feel contracted, encapsulated and separate. Whatever comes will eventually go. And if the mind starts looking for what doesn’t come and go, anything it finds will be another object, another imagination. That is what Toni [Packer, leading a retreat] was pointing out. And the objects can get very subtle in nature.

One of my Zen teachers, Charlotte Joko Beck, said, “Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.”

Joan Tollifson

Choiceless awareness is like this. It is not a specialised technique for meditation, nor a philosophical position, though it can be taken for either of those. I’m not sure – and this is the difficulty so many people have (myself included) when they first encounter the term in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s writings. What, exactly, are we being asked to do?

It has taken a long time, but gradually I have come to realise that just sitting, only that, aware not only of breathing, and the body resting in space, feeling what it feels, hearing what it hears, but also being aware of thoughts as they arise, and of the emotions and bodily states that can accompany them (fear, desire, wonder, grief…) as they well up and fade away, is nothing other than the vastness of which Joan Tollifson writes so movingly. Allowing it all, the empty awareness is itself the open ground, being-itself, Istigkeit.

But it isn’t something we do. That’s what is so difficult to explain. In stillness, it happens. As Tollifson writes (op. cit.), “And, of course, ‘we’ aren’t doing any of this. It is all happening by itself. Ever-fresh. Ungraspable.” It does happen all by itself. It always has. Just watch.

Umwelten again, but cleansed

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The senses constrain an animal’s life, restricting what it can detect and do. But they also define a species’ future, and the evolutionary possibilities ahead of it. For example, around 400 million years ago, some fish began leaving the water and adapting to life on land. In open air, these pioneers—our ancestors—could see over much longer distances than they could in water. The neuroscientist Malcolm MacIver thinks that this change spurred the evolution of advanced mental abilities, like planning and strategic thinking  Instead of simply reacting to whatever was directly in front of them, they could be proactive. By seeing farther, they could think ahead. As their Umwelten expanded, so did their minds.

An Umwelt cannot expand indefinitely, though. Senses always come at a cost. Animals have to keep the neurons of their sensory systems in a perpetual state of readiness so that they can fire when necessary. This is tiring work, like drawing a bow and holding it in place so that when the moment comes, an arrow can be shot. Even when your eyelids are closed, your visual system is a monumental drain on your reserves. For that reason, no animal can sense everything well.

Nor would any animal want to. It would be overwhelmed by the flood of stimuli, most of which would be irrelevant. Evolving according to their owner’s needs, the senses sort through an infinity of stimuli, filtering out what’s irrelevant and capturing signals for food, shelter, threats, allies, or mates. They are like discerning personal assistants who come to the brain with only the most important information. Writing about the tick, Uexküll noted that the rich world around it is “constricted and transformed into an impoverished structure” of just three stimuli [heat, touch and scent]. “However, the poverty of this environment is needful for the certainty of action, and certainty is more important than riches.” Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.

Ed Yong. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, pp.7-8

When Aldous Huxley wrote his astonishing 1954 study of the effects of psychedelics on the human mind, The Doors of Perception, he pointed out that the human brain and nervous system, in their normal configuration, function so as “to enable us to live, the brain and nervous system eliminate unessential information from the totality of the ‘Mind at Large’.” Under the influence of mescaline, however, the “miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence” becomes apparent, unfiltered, just as it is.

Now of course this is not an escape from the sensory component of the human Umwelt – we are still constrained by the information our senses can respond to (mescaline cannot enable us to see in ultraviolet, or accurately to sense the earth’s magnetic field) – but it is at least a partial escape from the functional processing of that information stream that presents us with the familiar, usable world of the everyday. As Huxley himself pointed out, it is possible to perceive directly Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, the untrammelled isness of things, the being-itself that our minds dissect in order to construct our daily lives; in itself, it is, as William Blake remarked, infinite: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Absent hare-brained theories of medieval magic mushroom culture, Eckhart was not under the influence of psychedelics. The contemplative technology of unenclosing humankind has millennia of research and development behind it, and as texts like The Cloud of Unknowing reveal, it was highly developed in at least some strands of medieval European monasticism.  To see things as they are to our unedited senses – through our own cleansed Umwelt – is as basic a human ability as breathing; only most of us have forgotten how. As Eckhart Tolle points out in our own time,

Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don’t interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don’t judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something — anything — and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the “isness” of all things. Move deeply into the Now.

You are leaving behind the deadening world of mental abstraction, of time. You are getting out of the insane mind that is draining you of life energy, just as it is slowly poisoning and destroying the Earth. You are awakening out of the dream of time into the present.

The Power of Now, p.63

Waves and the ocean

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…[T]hink of the vast ocean. There are waves that are catastrophic, there are little ripples, there is water crashing on the shore, but it’s all unquestionably ocean. The ocean is whole. I think this is one of the reasons humans love to look at the ocean: somehow the usual sense of “me” and “that” dissolves naturally. There’s still some kind of subject-object sensibility there, but it softens. And there’s something about that that we as a species fall in love with. We love that vastness, and there’s actually a very deep yearning for it. [We’re] nourished by the experience of wholeness.

Anne C Klein, Tricycle Magazine, August 2023

It is hard even to write of these things without sounding slightly silly, but somehow the image of waves and the ocean has, for as long as I can remember, had for me this sense not only of wholeness, but of ultimate security. The wave cannot fall out of the ocean; however much “subject-object sensibility” it manages to retain, it remains water. The awareness with which we are aware – of sense impressions, thoughts, emotions, whatever, even when we are asleep and dreaming – is the awareness within which all appearances arise.

To be still, listening, beside the open ocean, is all it takes; then our fretful wavelets still for a moment, if only between one breath and another, and we can sense the non-differentiation of Istigkeit, the unending of no thing. We are not other than what is.

Sounds

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This evening the sounds from the open window were clear and somehow more present than they often seem. The traffic from the road not a hundred yards away sounded almost like the tide on a shingle beach, only not so regular. The birds were quiet, though; the magpie family in the biggest of the hazels at the back of the garden were having a quiet (for magpies) conversation, and there was a blackbird trying a few desultory phrases, but his heart wasn’t really in it. A summer breeze rustled the leaves from time to time.

Sitting by the window, especially in summer, is full of these beloved instants. Even the familiar chair, and the floor beneath my feet, are gifts of love, somehow. Living beside a relatively busy main road through the town, and in distant earshot of the Bristol trains, there are always background sounds, some indefinite as the breeze, and some as clear and unmistakable as the buses that grumble away from the two nearby stops, one on either side of the road – on hot days with their air conditioning units whining with that particular, slightly panicky sound they have.

Somehow these sounds have grown to be as familiar as breathing. They are not noise; there is nothing they are disturbing – least of all me – and yet they are not really background either. I suppose it’s just their place in the dear fabric of what is that holds them there for me. I have learned not to tell stories about them to myself, that’s part of it. What they are is their own whatness; in a sense it is none of my business, and yet I am as much a part of the day as they are. We share this pool of Dorset air, its frequncies and its warmth, the movement of the breeze. We are together while I sit, morning and evening, the sounds and I. What more could I want?

Umwelt

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If you sit still for long enough then it will become apparent that there is no such entity as a discrete, permanent self that “has” experiences, thoughts, sensations. Of course there are experiences, but no one “has” them – they are no one’s possession, for there is no one separable from experience to possess them. And yet…

And yet it certainly feels as though I am I, feeling things. I have memories, preferences, longings, losses – so many losses – that don’t belong to anyone else; and they feel like the same kind of thing as these experiences, thoughts and sensations that happen in the present…

What is going on?

In the semiotic theories of Jakob Johann von Uexküll there crops up a wonderful word, Umwelt, the specific way an organism perceives, and interacts with, its environment and its particular circumstances. Not only does the Umwelt of a tick, or a bat (von Uexküll’s own examples) differ from yours or mine, ours differ from each other’s, just as one bat’s Umwelt will perhaps subtly differ from another bat’s.

Now, Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology – the study of subjective, lived experiences – used another, not dissimilar term, Lebenswelt (life-world), to speak of the human Umwelt, just as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins used his own term inscape to describe the unique inwardness – thisness – of a thing, and instress to describe its effect on the one who beholds the thing.

Maybe there is something here. Maybe this sense we have of being a “self” is precisely what each of our individual Umwelten feels like from the inside. Could this be the source of the very illusion of a soul, a granular individuality that goes on in such apparently adamantine uniqueness that it is impossible to conceive of its dissolving, even into the blessed expanse of death? The contemplative endeavour itself then becomes nothing less than the great adventure of seeing beyond the borders of the Lebenswelt, beyond the doors of perception themselves, out in the open ground of isness itself.